My grandma is a stroke survivor now suffering from cognitive issue and cardiopathy. She requires now 7–9 different pills and drugs taken three times daily, with dosages that vary by time of day and change monthly based on her doctor’s latest advice. This difficulty had troubled our family for long. To manually prepare these doses everyday had become an overwhelming burden for my family, since I am a boarder and my parents have their own jobs to do.

The current existing solution is simple: manual distribution. usually my dad wake up early in the morning to prepare the pills for the day according to the prescription. They update the monthly prescription on a notebook and prepare the pills and drugs accordingly every morning. On the market currently, the product closest to the what we needed is an industrial dispenser that is designed to dispense a certain number of things in a bag such as screws or bolts. However, this equipment is completely unusable for our case because it is not only gigantic, since it is designed to be working with a streamline, but also unable to dispense at set time rather is it continuously dispensing stuff. Moreover it is very complicated to change the dispensing quantity of items in this device. Thus are we still dispensing the pills manually.

The solution I came up with is an Automated Pill Distribution System (APDS) that includes auto pill distribution at set time of the day and auto update of the dosage according to the prescription detected and recognized through a camera. A user-friendly GUI is necessary and there should be an admin login for setups for the sake of security. This system is proposed to be based on python for GUI frontend and OCR analysis plus an embedded platform such as Espressif ESP32 for powering the actuators. The GUI shall be based on python PyQt5 library for its simplicity and decent visual. The OCR will involve using an API from YOUDAO, since the API offers an easy Python socket and functions to utilize it. Data processing will be done on an embedded platform and it will further control the actuators to activate distribution function. In this case the entire distribution process can be automated and saves he and his family from the burden of daily pill distribution